Is there any reason why almost universally chickens and cows are the go to farm animal? Like why aren’t there cultures where people are allergic to their produce and meat? Or we just got really lucky and domesticated the species that seems to just work for most if not all societies. Just seems weird that we picked cows and not some other big game like some bison or something. Why chickens? Why not ducks or geese?
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Once an animal has been domesticated, it’s _much_ easier to adapt it to a new location than to go through the trouble of domesticating an entirely new animal. So domestic animals tend to spread, with people moving existing ones around instead of domesticating new local animals.
>Like why aren’t there cultures where people are allergic to their produce and meat?
Allergens don’t really work like that. There isn’t really big variation in what people are allergic to, human immune systems are all pretty similar. You couldn’t really _find_ an animal that would only be edible to some societies. Now, there is a tick that can induce red meat allergies, but that isn’t super common, and shellfish allergies and the like are more of an individual environmental response, not something a while population could have.
Most of the world is lactose intolerant, but that’s not technically an allergy. Societies where dairy cattle became important adapted to become lactose tolerant as a result, because of the advantage of being able to drink milk into adulthood. But that came long after domestication.
>Just seems weird that we picked cows and not some other big game like some bison or something.
Some of this may be about the different temperament of the species but some of it may just be coincidence. In the old world, cattle came first and who would bother to go after bison if they already in the cattle, which are similar. Also in the old world, people were able to “work up” to big animals like cattle and horses after starting out with smaller, easier to handle goats and sheep. In North America, they didn’t have such starter animals, maybe that’s why they never tried domesticating bison. Or maybe not. Human history doesn’t follow an automatic similar course in every society, so it could just be chance that some things were never domesticated here.
>Why chickens? Why not ducks or geese?
Many ducks and geese _are_ domesticated. But chicken are easer to farm in bulk using modern techniques, so they are what’s for sale in supermarkets.
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